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Action call over dying Dead Sea

The surface area of the sea has shrunk by a third in 50 years

By Martin Patience
BBC, in Ein Gedi, southern Israel

Standing close to a grey, concrete building enclosing a spa, Ein Gedi kibbutz member Merav Ayalon points at the brown mudflats a few metres away.

Twenty years ago the Dead Sea water would have lapped at her feet, she says. But now, glittering in the distance, the sea lies almost one km away from the spa.

"We are watching the sea vanishing," says Ms Ayalon. "I feel like the sea is a dying man calling out for help and there's nothing I can do."

In the last 50 years, the Dead Sea, the world's saltiest body of water and lowest point on earth, has seen its surface area shrink by a third and its depth drop by 25 meters.

The water that once flowed into the Dead Sea from the River Jordan has been diverted by Syria, Jordan, Israel for agricultural and hydro-electrical projects.

Environmentalists are now warning that drastic action has to be taken to avert an ecological disaster as the Dead Sea drops by a metre every year.

"It's a catastrophe," says Gideon Bromberg, the director of Friends of the Earth in Israel. There's nothing natural about the demise of the Dead Sea"

Thousands of sinkholes - where the land collapses in on itself - have appeared on the shore's coast threatening the infrastructure. The Ein Gedi kibbutz closed a camp site after a worker fell into a sinkhole.

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